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language: Gaelic
country: UK
year: 1991
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 21.8.23-25.8.23
I’ve been wanting to read Iain Mac a’ Ghobhainn’s Turas tro Shaoghal Falamh for literally years and I finally again have access to it, so it was one of the first books I requested from the library. it looked to be a weird post-nuclear apocalypse novel about a teenager traveling an empty world. I forget how the blurb described it but for some reason I was under the impression he was in communication with a teen at the other end of the Hebrides and they were trying to meet up, but this is not the case. it is, however, a weird post-nuclear apocalypse novel about a teenager traveling through a not-quite-empty world.
Ruairidh and his father took shelter in a bunker when the bombs started falling; a year later, with his father having died during their confinement, Ruairidh emerges, guided by his father’s last suggestion to him, that he search for his aunt. this sends him on a cross-country trip where he meets a painter documenting the ruins of the world so that someday people will be able to remember it, a cult who attempt to sacrifice him to appease an angry (Christian) god, a widow who has clung to her sanity by making up stories about the dolls she collected during her world travels, and a lonely old man who mistakes Ruairidh for his lost son and tries to keep him from leaving “again”. the narration is fairly engaging, if at times a bit repetitive; it seems like Mac a’ Ghobhainn was phoning it in a bit stylistically — I’ve read Bùrn is Aran and I know he can do better. the editing was a bit of a mess, especially the quotation marks.
it suffers first from many of the common pitfalls of postapocalyptic fiction, especially the presumption that in a postapocalyptic world people will “naturally” “revert” to solitary living, murderous cults, or roving gangs of bandits, with any form of cooperative and not-cultish social organization as an unlikely aberration even if it’s technically possible.
it also suffers from some more idiosyncratic pitfalls that seem to come primarily from Mac a’ Ghobhainn’s literary taste (though they’re not necessarily unrepresentative of the genre as a whole, either), in particularly the framing of the postapocalyptic landscape as a Western-style frontier (probably uncoincidentally, Mac a’ Ghobhainn’s other novel for this series, A’ Bheinn Òir, is described by the library blurb as a “Gaelic Western”) and of Ruairidh’s journey through it explicitly and repeatedly as a kind of Robinsonade (though somewhat manquée), turning Ruairidh into a colonial explorer, albeit an abandoned one like Robinson Crusoe.
the highlight might be the solitary preacher’s sermon to an empty church at the end of the novel, in particular the identification of Christian hell as “an teine agus an solas” (i.e., nuclear apocalypse), which I think raises the possibility of heaven as conversely dark and wet, which is an interesting thought to play with.
moods: dark, emotional, reflective